Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^ Emma Bovary is bored. She’s bored with her humdrum life; married to a boring and mediocre doctor she lives under the burden that people judge her only relative to her husband and she struggles to find her own identity. She fills her empty days reading chick-lit romance novels and shopping before embarking on a string of adulterous affairs trying to find a man who will love her and appreciate her as a person in her own right. So far, so Desperate Housewives. The bookshop shelves are filled with this kind chick-lit stuff ... more

I have heard this book described as a great paradigm for modern feminism. Personally, Im not convinced. I spent half of my reading time trying to decide whether its female protagonist - Emma Bovary, is weak, feeble and manipulative or a passionate woman destroyed by the confinements of her sex along with those of 19th Century France. Emma Bovary is a tragic heroine - or is she? Flaubert's book begins with a description of its male protagonist (if that is the most apt term!) Charles Bovary. Charles is a doctor and the pinnacle of provincial French attitudes. Having been chosen a wife by his ... more

Madame Bovary is, in essence, an exploration of provincial boredom, and, ironically for one of the best loved of all nineteenth-century novels, the dangers of reading books. Published in 1857, it was a controversial novel causing a moral uproar that, before his subsequent acquittal, actually landed Flaubert in court. Despite this fracas, the novel became a trailblazing exploration of the themes of boredom, adultery and materialism, and is, therefore, as relevant today as it has ever been. The book unfolds disarmingly, by choosing not to introduce its 'heroine' until second chapter, focussing ... more

Indulge me a moment while I relate a short tale. More years ago than I care to remember, when I was at school, we were assigned, in a French oral class, the task of working in pairs, one of us taking the part of a police officer and the other a witness, to converse in French, asking for and giving the description of a person spotted at the scene of some fictitious crime. I worked with my friend Louise and, although this is blatant boasting, I have to say that we were both some distance ahead of the rest of our classmates in our proficiency of the language. I took the part of the police officer ... more

On the face of it, this looks like being a really good read. The cover (I read the Oxford World's Classics edition) tells the reader how the book is a landmark of world literature; how it marked a great shift in French literature; etc, etc. So you set about it with high hopes. The book tells the story of Emma Bovary, a country doctor's wife who becomes increasingly disillusioned and bored with her life and her husband. She seeks escape in a series of adulterous affairs, into which she increasingly throws all her energies, neglecting everything else about her. Lawyer's clerk Léon, the dashing ... more